2.07.2011

it's curtains for me

for the longest time the kitchen was my favorite room in our house. see, we painted and redecorated our house one room at a time. when we first got married and i moved in, i just wanted everything done so we rushed a few rooms and ended up HATING them. so we decided blank was better than eye-gouging tacky until we had the actual inspiration and money to do it right.

a big part of this has to do with the fact that i have no style. zero. no eye for color or design or any of the good stuff i see on so many blogs out there where these people just seem to ooze eye candy. i will feel like i have it and then i wake up in a lime colored bedroom with 50,000 pieces of citrus colored ikea tchotchkes "decorating" the walls and shelves. whoops. luckily when armageddon hits and the power plants are under the brutal dominion of the tea party regime, we will be safe off the grid since i have about 1200 color coordinated candles to get us through.

the kitchen was the first room that we actually did right (granted, now that i am looking at the pics below, i am kind of hating how cluttered and busy and matchy and country granny the walls are, but whatever). i loved the vibrant blue walls and all the different shades of yellow and red that went along with it. all inspired by two canvas paintings we found (which i will not call art because they came from wal-mart. shoop!). i couldn't find any curtains that i loved for the doors, and since i was feeling guilty about our dogs staring in at us all the time (which would NEVER happen anymore because: A, i have kids so animals now cannot make me feel real emotion, and B, they are fenced up in our huge backyard which is like 50 feet from our back door and my eyes aren't sharp enough to discern yearning on their faces at that distance) so i just went ahead and pulled the trigger (on the curtains, not the dogs...oh but i wish) and got some $8 plain white ikea ones.

this was during the south's ice-a-palooza. please note the tupperware full of oreo truffles on the counter.

these plain white guys did their job just fine. the only thing was they were dust magnets. like seriously, i think the swiffer people buy their materials from the same place ikea uses for their curtains because they attract dust with equal prowess. but unlike a table, dusting fabric doesn't really work. so i was left with nasty, dingy hanging yuckness in what became a lovely shade of husbands-underwear white

in addition, these got recalled by ikea because they are a flagrant choking hazard. you were able to draw them up by a cord and i always thought i had installed ours wrong because that cord got long and noose-y real quick.

even before i knew how to sew i thought this would be an easy redo project. you'd just need a big rectangle of new fabric and then you'd get someone to sew it on (little did i know that i would become someone) the existing panels.

i found some awesome home-decor weight fabric at ikea (we go there a LOT) right after layla was born. it was lemon yellow and had a really cool dandelion design on it. and the bolt was wide enough that i could cut the design in half for a cool effect on the doors. well it didn't turn out to be as easy as i thought (that stuff just would NOT iron flat), but i did manage to finish them and i really like the results:


and the after. the nasty flash makes the blue way brighter than it really is, but i can't blame it for the cluttered walls (those are judah's fault since we had to move our knick-knacks out of his reach). also, please note the now EMPTY tupperware container like 2 days later. every time you hear me say "baby weight" from now on, you can go ahead and amend it in your head to "oreo ball weight"

really cool effect when its bright outside and no lights are on inside.

i was going to replicate the old ones' ability to be drawn up with a cord but decided with babes in the house no thin strings hanging around is a better idea. so i made them tie-backable instead up hoist-uppable by fashioning some ties with my scraps and then screwed them into the door frame.

we should probably rake at some point

i'm not sure i love the look of them tied back as much, but they're functional and will not strangle my child. 2 out of 3 isn't bad.

putting a picture of my kitchen wall on the internet has made me self-conscious. must go redecorate. please don't judge me, i already said i had no style.

4 comments:

  1. Looks great! I always like your bright colors!

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  2. I think your kitchen is AWESOME! And I think you have great style - I love the pictures of your bedroom too. :)

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  3. I liked the tied back look... and I call them oreogasms :-)

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  4. i love love the look when it's dark inside and bright outside. fabulous! nice going with the tie-backs. so smart and cute!

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